Rock Gardening in the February Sun

February weather always teases me into feeling that real spring is just around the bend. After ten years in Colorado I know the warm weather and sweet air do not mean the end of freezing night temperatures nor do they mean the snow has all passed. We will get another snowstorm, probably a big one. But for now, with snowdrops and violets peeking through the mulch, temperatures kissing fifty, and finches and juncos singing about love, I need to get out into the garden. Since I cannot plant anything and I'm not doing any winter sowing this year, I've been moving rocks.

Our house was built in 1950, and sometime in the last sixty years someone moved a whole lot of rocks into our yard. I keep uncovering them, most about the size of two fists nestled together. Some are larger, requiring my rusty red wheelbarrow to move. Every year I shift them about, front yard to back, side to side, circling beds or marking paths. One year I made a spiral of rocks, but I kept tripping over them on the way to the garden. An apple tree is planted in that spot now. Some years I line them up as borders, other years I scatter them for a more natural look.

This year I have an idea to turn a strip along the south-facing fence, which has never grown vegetables or anything but weeds very well, into a rock garden. I'm on the hunt for a dwarf pine tree or two, and I picture these resiny evergreens surrounded by a natural scattering of rocks nestled with thymes, pasqueflower, and heuchera or something little and white and dainty. I stare at the garden for ten minutes until one row of rocks looks all wrong and I rip it out. Another row seems to cut off the flow of a pathway, so that comes out. Then the pathway, flagstone also uncovered near the front door shortly after we moved in and promptly moved into the back garden, also looks all wrong. I feel the need to pull it all out and do it the right way, raking the soil flat, putting down sand, reconstructing the mosaic stone path, and tucking in dwarf thyme into the cracks.

This is the perfect time of year for this garden task, as I can see the shape of the yard without greenery. It's all bones and brown grass. Rock bones, not animal bones. Bones of the earth. As I haul and dream I feel connected to the builders of Stonehenge and artists like Andy Goldsworthy who crafts outdoor sculptures out of natural objects. I aspire to craft a garden of art, though mostly it's more like a pile of rocks here and a smattering there. I recall how Rebecca Dye, landscape architect, listens to the rocks she places in gardens. They tell her where they want to go and with which other rocks they want to sit (I wrote about Rebecca in Sacred Land). I try to listen to the rocks. The result is more alive than a random placing, if no Andy Goldsworthy.

I feel more alive, too, carrying rocks about the yard, dreaming of spring and feeling my own roots stretch into the cool dark earth. My work becomes a conversation between my hands and heart, the land, the stones, and the spring-like day. Spring planting may be a while off yet, but by playing with rocks I get to stretch my gardening fingers and am happy.

Fractal Intelligence

We recently watched the NOVA Science Now episode "How Smart Are Animals?" A discussion followed  as to why and how we are asking this question. We know animals are "smarter" than our species has historically given them credit, but we're having a hard time quantifying that intelligence. It occurred to me that underlying this question is actually a more foundational question: What is intelligence? What is it to be human?

It bothers us humans that there is a difference between us and non-human animals, but that the more we dig into the question of what that difference really is, the harder it is to articulate what that difference is. We tend to say things about emotions, intelligence, tools, and language. But non-human animals definitely feel emotions. From an embarrassed cat to a grieving elephant, animals feel. Many animals use tools, from crows to chimps. Many others have of course evolved their own built-in tools, including beaks, claws, long tongues, and the like. We say this isn't a tool - yet it's no different, really, than our evolved thumb. It works, and we use it to achieve our goals.

Scientists are fascinated with the measurement of intelligence and language. But so often the measurement of these qualities is to compare them against human intelligence and language. We are only seeing other species intelligence through the lens of our own. Same with language.

If you slow down cricket song, it sounds like angels singing. If you slow down bird song, it sounds like jazz. Maybe scientists need to be using not spoken language, but music to study animal intelligence. Music and fractals.

I suspect that animal - and plant and rock and air and water - intelligence is not linear like ours (currently) is, but is fractal in nature. (I mean to say that human intelligence is currently linear as we understand it.)

We're fond of saying that humans use only 10% of our brains. We think we will be "smarter" when we access more parts of the brain. Interesting that music activates many different parts of the brain at once, as well as these parts' interactions with each other. I suspect becoming smarter is not about simply using more linear brain space, but about delving up and inward fractally.  I don't know what this means neurologically, but as an artist and a dreamer I get a certain Yes when I visualize the idea. Nature's intelligence and language is musical and fractal and we will understand it - and ourselves - better when we delve more deeply into these ways of understanding.